Roberto Rossellini's
Paisà
, along with his
Roma, città aperta
(1945), introduced post-war American audiences to Italian neorealism,
which proved to be the first wave in a series of European influences that
altered the shape of American cinema. Neo-realism, a movement that emerged
from the shattered Italian film industry immediately after World War II,
concerned itself with an almost documentary-like depiction of the hardship
and suffering of the Italian people during and after World War II.
Directors like Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti took to
the streets in order to make their films. In the process they articulated
an aesthetic of cinematic realism that called for the use of
non-professional actors, on-location shooting, the abandonment of slick
"Hollywood" production values, and a self-conscious
rejection of commercial considerations. What emerged was a fresh and
energetic film style which largely rejuvenated the pre-war stagnation of
the Italian cinema. Years later Rossellini wrote that he used this new
approach to attempt to understand the events of the fascist years, which
had overwhelmed him personally and the Italian people generally. He chose
the particular film style he did for its morally neutral approach; he
simply wanted to observe reality objectively and to explore the facts that
implicated his country in the fascist horror of the war. He also wanted to
create a balance sheet on the experience so that Italians could begin to
live life on new terms.

Paisà
contains six episodes that trace the American invasion of Italy from the
Allied landing in Sicily in 1934 until the Italian surrender in the spring
of 1944. Rossellini does not present the war in terms of armies,
strategies, and grand plans but rather as a tragedy involving the death
and the suffering of human beings caught in the crush of forces beyond
their control. Although some of the critics, among them Robert Warshow,
found the film too sentimental in places,
Paisà
received good reviews outside of Italy, and it has retained its place as
one of the classics of neo-realism, especially in the United States.

Neo-realism and Rossellini's remarks concerning
Paisà
raise some interesting questions about the mimetic nature of film and
about the significance of a point of view of doctrine in shaping the final
cinematic product.
Paisà
is neither a doctrinaire film nor, as Rossellini would have it, a neutral
one. The film is not a long documentary, as some critics have rather
simple-mindedly suggested, nor is it a film guided by a manifesto. It is a
film which provides a new beginning, to borrow Rossellini's balance
sheet metaphor, and does so by stripping film of the appurtenances of the
pre-war studio world. Rossellini was striving for a basic sincerity in his
films, and it was primarily toward that end that he made
Paisà
with a truthful simplicity which is so effective.